Six Inch Valley

Eddie wished this goddamn dog would just shut the fuck up already.

The rottweiler lunged at his ankles again, ignoring the chain around his neck that kept him tethered to a length of rebar buried in the dirt of the front yard. Standing on the crumbling cinder block stoop, Eddie couldn't help but admire the dog's dedication.

His jacket sleeve slid down his wrist as he banged on the aluminum screen door again, and he caught a glimpse of his watch through the thin light of the bare bulb to the right of the door: quarter to four. Even so, there was no way anybody was sleeping through all the racket out here.

“Tina, c'mon,” he said, watching his breath drift up and over the low roof of the trailer. “Open up.”

He heard footsteps inside, saw movement in the darkness behind the threadbare curtains. “Tina,” he said again, raising his voice over the dog's. “It's Eddie.”

He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his army surplus field jacket, trying to guard against the chill. “Fuck, Tina, c'mon. It's cold out here.”

The wobbly storm door opened slightly, the flimsy security chain holding it close to the jamb. Tina's eyes peered out through the crack. “You shouldn't be here, Eddie,” she said, her voice wavering on the other side of the screen door.

“I know,” he said, his head on a swivel, scanning the rest of the trailer park. Incredibly, no one seemed to know he was there, although he knew it was more likely that the neighbors were all keeping their noses in their own business. It was that sort of place.

A thin country tune leaked from an open window somewhere nearby, some of that cookie cutter shit about tailgates and jean shorts and keg parties that seemed like the only thing on the radio these days. Eddie flipped his jacket collar up high on his neck, cinched the zipper tight in the front.

“They're watching my place,” Tina said. “Been out there all week.”

Eddie shook his head. “That Caprice parked up on the shoulder? They're gone.” He turned and looked down the trailer park's narrow drive that led out to the highway, as if to confirm. “They packed up about three o’clock the last couple nights. That's why I came so late – been sitting in the woods up there watching them.”

The storm door slammed shut, and Eddie could hear Tina fumbling with the chain on the other side. She opened the door again, wider this time, then threw the screen door open, almost knocking him off the stoop.

“You got five minutes,” she said.

Eddie stepped inside. He took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the darkness as Tina shut and locked both doors behind him. He turned and took her in. She was wearing some kind of short, silky robe over her long bare legs. It was hard to tell in the shadows, but he was pretty sure she wasn't wearing anything underneath. It was nice to look at, but he wished she wouldn’t do that.

Despite all that, he found it hard to pull his attention away from the shotgun in her right hand.

“You always answer the door like that?” he asked, pointing at the gun.

“At four in the morning I do.” Tina used her left hand to pull the robe tight around her neck, a feeble attempt at modesty given the amount of leg she was sharing.

Eddie looked around the trailer's living room. A stained ratty couch sat along one wall beneath the room's only window, a coffee table littered with empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays in front of it. A broken, recovered recliner sat in the corner, pointed at the kind of large wooden console television no store had sold in thirty years. The small dining room table in the next room was covered in junk mail and empty tissue boxes, and he could see into the kitchen where the sink overflowed with last week's dishes.

“You want some help cleaning this shit up?” he asked.

Tina's eyes flashed with anger, and she jerked the shotgun up wildly. “Don't you fucking judge me,” she said, poking him in the chest with the barrel.

Eddie held his palms up by his ears in a gesture of surrender. “Easy, easy,” he said.

When he was reasonably sure she wasn't going to shoot him, he reached a pair of tentative fingers down towards the barrel of the gun and pushed it slowly down towards the floor. “I'm gonna take that now, huh?” he said softly.

She let him. He gently removed the shotgun from her hands and propped it up in its usual spot against the wall beside the door.

“Damn, girl,” Eddie said, feeling his chest loosen. “You're right – I shouldn'ta said that. I'm sorry.”

Tina nodded, accepting his apology. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyebrows and ground them there for a second, then exhaled deeply. She looked exhausted. “It's been a long week,” she said.

“Yeah.” Eddie reached inside his jacket and pulled a thick white brick of an envelope from an inner pocket. He tossed it on the recliner.

Tina stared at the envelope, but made no move to pick it up. “Whose is that?” she asked.

“Yours,” Eddie said. “That's Duane's take.”

Tina folded her arms across her chest, but didn't otherwise move.

“Take the money, Tina,” Eddie said. “He wanted to make sure you got it.”

“How much is it?”

“Half?” Eddie shrugged. “A little more, maybe. I don't know.”

Tina walked over to the recliner and bent to grab the envelope. She did so slowly, her long red hair falling across her face, and Eddie found himself looking down the front of her robe. He wished she hadn’t grabbed it that way. He hated that he couldn’t shake the feeling she might have done that on purpose.

Envelope in hand, she sat down in the recliner and crossed her legs at the ankles. She made no move to open the package, just squeezed it until her knuckles turned white.

“Heavy,” she said, weighing the money in her palm.

“Yeah.”

Tina drummed her fingers on the envelope. “The cops told me a little bit about how it happened,” she said. “You, uh, you were still there?”

Eddie nodded, then moved a pair of empty tissue boxes and had a seat on the couch. “I was there.”

Tina's breath double-clutched in her chest before escaping in a ragged sob. Eddie grabbed a handful of crumpled tissues from the coffee table and handed it to her, then looked away. Jesus, this was hard to watch.

***

The job had been fucked from the beginning. Duane did about four bumps of blow too many outside in the parking lot, and Eddie had almost climbed out of the truck and walked away before it ever got started.

“Christ, Eddie, relax,” Duane said. “Get back in the truck.”

Eddie hesitated, knowing he was violating Rule #1 in his old man's book: If you feel like there's anything wrong with the job – anything, no matter how small – you walk away. There's always another job, but not if things go south.

But this was Duane – he was closer to Eddie than the old man had ever been. Thick and thin, all that bullshit. “Fuck it,” Eddie said, ignoring every instinct in his body. “Let's do this.”

They hit the front door at a run, masks on and shotguns high. The place was a little check-cashing place and liquor store downtown near the bus station. Duane had figured to hit it early Friday morning right after they opened, since Friday was payday at the chicken plant and he knew all the guys that worked there would be stopping here after work, so it figured the safe would be well-stocked. Duane had cashed his own checks there for the twelve weeks he worked at the plant, before he got fired after coming up dirty on a piss test.

The guy behind the counter – a short, stocky man still rocking a thick Jheri curl – had his own shotgun out from under the counter before the front door even closed. He and Duane squeezed off rounds at the same time. Duane's aim was true, and took off the top layer of the man's curls along with half of his face. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Duane didn't fare much better, catching a full blast in the middle of his chest. He wasn't dead when he crashed backwards into the glass of the wine cooler section, but he wasn't far from it. His flannel shirt was instantly covered in a spreading dark stain, the cocaine in his system helping his heart pump the blood right out of his body at an accelerated pace.

Eddie expected the worst as he knelt in the pool of Duane's blood spreading across the dirty tile floor. “S-s-s-so cold, Eddie,” Duane said.

“You're going to be just fine,” Eddie said, once he got over the shock of seeing that his old friend was still alive. For a little while longer, at least. He reached down and rolled Duane's mask up over his mouth and eyes. “You stay with me, brother.”

“G-g-g-get the f-f-fuckin' money.”

Eddie could hear sirens in the distance as he stood and moved behind the counter, careful not to step in the shop owner's blood. There it was, just like Duane said it would be: the safe underneath the register, door standing wide open, twenty dollar bills stacked like bricks. “I don't think that dumb motherfucker can remember the combination,” Duane had said a couple nights before as he laid out the job over a couple of beers at Mikey's. “It's been setting wide open every time I've been in there.”

And it surely was. Eddie reached inside his jacket to pull out a couple of those recycled grocery bags all the hippies over in Chapel Hill were using. He started filling them up, pausing after every few handfuls to glance back at Duane. He was fading fast.

Outside, the sirens grew louder.

***

“You don't know how much y'all got out of the safe?”

Eddie shook his head. “Wasn't a whole lot of time for counting – I know I got most of it, though. Duane made sure of that.”

Tina laughed, a wet, sputtering noise that was more of a sob, really, full of mucus and tears. “That sounds about right,” she said, wiping at her eyes.

She curled her bottom lip and exhaled deeply, blowing her bangs out of her face. “God,” she said. “Can't believe I didn't get a chance to say goodbye.”

Eddie reached across the space between the couch and recliner and laid his fingers atop Tina's hand where it rested on the chair's arm rest. She stiffened a bit at his touch, then relaxed and turned her hand over beneath his.

“He knew you loved him,” Eddie said, reminding himself to breathe as she gave his fingers a squeeze. “You didn't have to tell him anything.”

***

Outside, the sirens grew closer. They'd been inside the store now for two and a half minutes.

“How m-m-much?”

Eddie took a look in the bags – he hadn't bothered counting as he emptied the safe. “I don't know,” he said. “Eight, ten thousand, maybe?”

Eddie looked away as Duane's wound bubbled and he gasped in pain.

“Look, w-w-we both know the score here – leave me.”

“I'm not gonna –”

“Go.”

Eddie hesitated, then nodded. He lifted one of the bags by the straps, showed it to Duane. “I'll make sure Tina's taken care of.”

Duane's eyes snapped open. “Tina? Fuck that bitch.”

He shook his head, coughed. “I don't owe her shit.”

Eddie gripped the bags tighter, backed away from his friend. “C'mon, Duane, what're you –”

“Not one cent.” Duane coughed again, and a steady stream of blood leaked from his mouth. “Not one fuckin' cent.”

Eddie didn't know what to say, not sure if this was the pain talking, or the blow, or the truth.

“My ass was one foot out the door already – crazy bitch.”

“Duane –”

“Make sure Jodi gets my cut.”

“Jodi?”

Duane's eyes opened wide with pain as his body was racked by another series of violent coughs. “You don't know her?” he asked Eddie when he could speak again. “She dances part-time on the weekends at Mikey's. Big fuckin' cans – I think you'd like her.”

***

“I just loved him so much, you know?”

Eddie nodded, looking for the door. He didn't want to hear this shit.

“I mean, was he perfect? Hell, no, but neither was I. We had our problems. But we had love, you know?”

Eddie nodded again as he let go of Tina's hand and stood up. He had a lot of things he wanted to say.

“Yeah,” he said instead.

***

The sirens grew closer. They'd been inside for three minutes.

Eddie jerked a thumb towards the door that led to the store's rear exit and the alley that ran behind the building. They'd scoped this route out two nights before. “I'm gonna go,” he said.

He was glad they came in Duane's truck – there was nothing to tie him to the scene, other than the missing money and a few boot prints in the blood. He only wore a size ten, though – nothing out of the ordinary. Could be anybody.

“Hold up,” Duane said.

Eddie turned, waited through another coughing fit. “Go ahead and rack both of these shotguns for me before you cut outta here,” Duane said. “I'll buy you some time.”

Eddie nodded. “Alright.”

He squatted down and set Duane up with his shotgun in his right hand, then racked his own gun and put it in Duane's left.

Duane laughed, a ragged wet wheeze, as Eddie stood up. “I'm a badass now, huh, Eddie?”

“You were always a badass.”

Eddie started toward the back door, then turned back. “You take care of yourself, Duane.”

***

“You take care of yourself, Tina,” Eddie said, his hand on the doorknob to leave.

“Thanks for coming by,” Tina said. “I mean it.”

Eddie shrugged. “I told Duane I would.”

“You were always a better friend than he deserved.”

Eddie could feel his neck warm underneath his field jacket. “I don't know about all that,” he said, looking out the screen door at the dog lying in the yard.

Tina walked over to the door and wrapped him in a hug that lasted just a second too long to be entirely friendly. When she broke the embrace, he could barely breathe.

Tina placed the palm of her hand flat against his chest. “You be careful,” she whispered.

Eddie nodded, his mouth tight, breathing through his nose, then opened the door and went outside, the night air cool against his warm skin. He gave the trailer park a quick once over before stepping down off the stoop into the yard. All was quiet – the dog couldn't even be bothered to raise his head off the ground. He started to make his way back into the woods where he had parked his truck.

“Hey, Eddie?”

Eddie closed his eyes so tight he saw stars. “Yeah?” he said, turning around.

Tina stood in the open doorway of the trailer, holding a red fingernail lightly against her teeth. “You still wish you'd met me first?”

Eddie held her eyes for a long moment before answering.

“Every day,” he said.

BIO: Frank Byrns lives in suburban Maryland and writes about the rural South of his youth. Some of his previous stories have been published in such markets as BULL, Shotgun Honey, All Due Respect, Plan B Magazine, Literary Garage, and the WW Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction.

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